Telecommunication by mobile services may be available in various environments. The general application of such services is indicated as telematics, which refers to the integrated application of telecommunications and informatics, whereby technologies for sending, receiving, and storing information via telecommunication devices are put into operation for realization, for example, of home and business applications. For example, in the automotive environment vehicular infotainment and telematics are offered via multiple devices, including devices installed in the vehicle and mobile devices carried by a user and optionally connected to a vehicle communication system. For example, mobile devices may include Personal Digital Assistants and mobile phones.
Current telematic systems installed in an automobile (automotive telematics systems) are adapted to control multiple network access devices (NADs) that are installed in the automobile (e.g., a built-in telephone) and/or that are mobile devices connectable with a computational unit of the telematic system via a wireless technology (e.g., Bluetooth or WLAN). The NADs may belong to different providers providing services with different payment, roaming, and availability schemes/rules. Furthermore, providers may apply rules among each other, thus generating consortiums of networks which can be considered from the point of view of a single NAD as a “home network” or “preferable roaming network”. The general management of the connections and usages of the multiple NADs and different provider networks is very involved and not realized in a satisfying manner in current systems, considering the possible varieties of applying the above mentioned schemes and rules.
General management and architectural concepts for controlling a network by some application logic of a specific service are known in the art. In order to apply different devices of a telematic system according to the devices' individual capabilities, customer requirements, and/or provider restrictions on Quality of Service (QoS) strategies have been implemented in the past that, in particular, allow for end-to-end management of some terminal equipment. However, such strategies do not concern the management of multiple individual telematic devices (Network Access Devices) comprised in a terminal equipment but rather treat the entire terminal equipment as a single network access device (NAD). Moreover, conventionally the selection of networks for applications is associated with handovers wherein a single NAD is associated with the service application logic of an individual provider. Thus, there is still a need for an improved kind of managing the usage of multiple telematic devices of a terminal equipment in order to optimize performance and costs of user applications.